Categorie: Facebook

‘Facebook is a private company and can do what it wants’ screech precisely the people using the might of the state to twist Zuckerberg’s arm into censoring dissent for them

Once upon a time, Facebook espoused idealistic notions of making the world a more open and connected place. But when it comes to views the US establishment doesn’t like, Facebook magically remembers it’s also a “private company.”

So when Facebook abruptly suspended pages belonging to Maffick Media — a company which is 51 percent owned by RT’s video agency Ruptly — critics of RT were quick to argue the social platform could ban anyone it wants.

Facebook has suspended several accounts operated by Maffick Media without prior warning, right after CNN ran a report about the company’s perceived ties to the Kremlin.

In what seems to be a new step in the social media giant’s fight against perceived ‘Russian propaganda’, Facebook took down, without prior notice, several pages offering video content. The social media network said it would ask the administrators of Soapbox, Back Then and Waste-Ed to disclose their “Russian affiliations.”

“People connecting with Pages shouldn’t be misled about who’s behind them. Just as we’ve stepped up our enforcement of coordinated inauthentic behavior and financially motivated spam over the past year, we’ll continue improving so people can get more information about the Pages they follow,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

However, no official requests were filed with Maffick Media, the German-based company operating all three pages. They were not notified before the fact, which prompted an angry response (posted on Maffick’s front page at the time of writing) in which they branded Facebook policies “new McCarthyism.” All three pages remained offline on Monday.

The accounts were suspended shortly after CNN aired a report with the catchy headline “Kremlin funds viral videos aimed at millennials,” in which it listed all three pages as part of the Kremlin’s “influence campaign” targeting unsuspecting young American adults. CNN stated that German-based Maffick Media is “mostly owned” by Ruptly video news agency – a subsidiary of RT – and is thus in the Kremlin’s back pocket.

An open secret

CNN also repeatedly accused Maffick of concealing its suspected ties to Russia to mislead its audience. While, indeed, none of the pages bore a glowing stamp that said “paid for by the Kremlin,” they were never told that they were required to do so. Besides, no special effort was made to hide the funding sources – as proved by the CNN reporters themselves, who used an online commercial registers database to acquire documents showing that Maffick is 51 percent (which CNN generalized as “mostly”) owned by Ruptly.

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Dirty little secret: ‘Think tanks’ are among top culprits in media disinformation crisis

The social media giant has a disturbing number of former Obama officials in key positions of authority over content…

Imagine for a moment what it would look like if the federal government launched its own social media network. Every day, Americans could freely use the platform to express their views on everything from economic theory to the best tips for baking peanut butter cookies. They could even discuss their political views and debate the important issues of the day.

But what if the government were empowered to determine which political views are appropriate and which are too obscene for the American public? Well, it looks like this is already happening. Of course, the state has not created a social media network; they didn’t have to. It appears the government is using Facebook – the world’s largest social media company – to sway public opinion.

The Government’s Fingers In Facebook

The Free Thought Project recently published a report revealing that Facebook has some troubling ties to the federal government and that this connection could be enabling former state officials to influence the content displayed. The social media provider has partnered with various think tanks which receive state funding, while hiring an alarming number of individuals who have held prominent positions in the federal government.

Facebook recently announced their partnership with the Atlantic Council – which is partly funded by tax dollars – to ensure that users are presented with quality news stories. And by “quality,” it seems that they mean “progressive.” The council is well known for promoting far-left news sources, including the Xinhua News Agency, which was founded by the Communist Party of China. Well, that’s reassuring. What red-blooded American capitalist doesn’t want to get the news from a communist regime?

But there one aspect of this story is even more troubling: the government-to-Facebook pipeline. The company has employed a significant number of former officials in positions that grant them influence over what content is allowed on the platform.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy, prosecuted cybercrimes at the Department of Justice under President Obama.

Following publication of an explosive report about how Facebook deliberately ignored Apple’s iOS developer guidelines and sidestepped the app store to offer a controversial data harvesting app directly to consumers (the app was targeted at teens), Apple has delivered the Silicon Valley version of a punch to the nose by revoking Facebook’s developer certificate.

Apple announced its decision to revoke the certificate in a terse statement published Wednesday morning.

NEW: Apple now says it has revoked Facebook’s iOS developer certificate, which Apple intends to be used for a company’s employees to sideload apps without needing the App Store, not for the purpose FB used.

As one tech blogger speculated, Facebook probably believed that their apps are “too popular” and that the company could “do what they like”. By revoking the certificate, which will prohibit Facebook from developing internal apps on iOS, Apple is sending a message that this is decidedly not the case, and no developer is too big to ignore Apple’s rules.

Facebook shares are sliding on the news.

Apple shares have also ticked lower on the news.

However, Apple has spared Facebook the ultimate punishment. It hasn’t removed its apps from the App Store, which would be significantly more damaging both to Facebook’s users metrics and, we imagine, its share price.

Facebook will set up two new centers to monitor “election integrity,” based in Dublin and Singapore. These centers will tackle fake news and hate speech, and will probably trigger fresh accusations of censorship.

After its hands-off approach to content policing led to accusations of fake news and misinformation in 2016, Facebook dramatically ramped up its content-policing efforts in the run-up to November’s midterm elections in the US. The social media giant partnered up with third-party ‘fact checkers’ to vet news content, trained an AI to spot and remove “false news stories,” introduced transparency rules for political advertisements, and went as far as building a physical “war room” to monitor elections for “foreign interference” in real-time.

Now, the social media giant is taking its aggressive approach worldwide.

Facebook announced on Monday it will set up two new regional centers, located in its Dublin and Singapore offices. Facebook’s Dublin office is the company’s biggest location outside California.

“These teams will add a layer of defense against fake news, hate speech and voter suppression, and will work cross-functionally with our threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, community operations, legal and other teams,” read a blog post from Facebook. As well as probing Facebook, the teams will monitor Instagram and WhatsApp for misuse, according to another blog post from the company.

Facebook’s US-based “war room” attracted some media attention in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, but the company itself was tight-lipped on what exactly its staff did to detect malicious foreign activity and election meddling. The company’s head of civic engagement, Samidh Chakrabarti, only said that “we’ve been working with governments around the world, with security experts around the world, with civic society around the world to share information about threats that we see.”

Among the experts consulted by Facebook is the Atlantic Council. NATO’s academic wing, the Atlantic Council teamed up with Facebook last summer to help the social network “expose and explain falsehood online.”

Read more

The Atlantic Council’s digital efforts to date have included poking RT for nonexistent evidence of election meddling,

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

Facebook orchestrated a multiyear effort that duped children and their parents out of money, in some cases hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and then often refused to give the money back, according to court documents unsealed tonight in response to a Reveal legal action.

The records are part of a class-action lawsuit focused on how Facebook targeted children in an effort to expand revenue for online games, such as Angry Birds, PetVille and Ninja Saga.

The more than 135 pages of unsealed documents, which include internal Facebook memos, secret strategies and employee emails, paint a troubling picture of how the social media giant conducted business.

Facebook encouraged game developers to let children spend money without their parents’ permission–something the social media giant called “friendly fraud”–in an effort to maximize revenues, according to a document detailing the company’s game strategy.

Sometimes the children did not even know they were spending money, according to another internal Facebook report. Facebook employees knew this. Their own reports showed underage users did not realize their parents’ credit cards were connected to their Facebook accounts and they were spending real money in the games, according to the unsealed documents.

For years, the company ignored warnings from its own employees that it was bamboozling children.

A team of Facebook employees even developed a method that would have reduced the problem of children being hoodwinked into spending money, but the company did not implement it, and instead told game developers that the social media giant was focused on maximizing revenues.

When parents found out how much their children had spent–one 15-year-old racked up $6,500 in charges in about two weeks playing games on Facebook–the company denied requests for refunds. Facebook employees referred to these children as “whales”–a term borrowed from the casino industry to describe profligate spenders. A child could spend hundreds of dollars a day on in-game features such as arming their character with a flaming sword or a new magic spell to defeat an enemy–even if they didn’t realize it until the credit card bill arrived.

Facing increased public scrutiny, Google and Facebook spent record amounts of money lobbying the US government on privacy and antitrust policies in 2018, with both companies topping previous highs, new data filings showed.

In quarterly filings to Congress disclosed on Tuesday, Google revealed that it dished out a company-record of $21.2 million on Washington lobbying last year, besting its previous record of $18.22 million from 2012. The search giant spent $18.04 million on lobbying in 2017.

Facebook disclosed a lobbying spend of $12.62 million, which was up from its previous high of $11.51 million in 2017, according to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics which tracks money in politics.

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Imagine! An ‘alternative internet’ not ‘completely in the hands of Facebook & Google’

Companies like Google and Facebook have faced increased scrutiny into their policies and practices in recent years. Both have been accused of using “dark patterns” to trick their users into adopting certain privacy policies and using “misleading wording” to make the policies too convoluted for users to figure out. They have also battled accusations of political bias against both right wing and left wing activists

Lawmakers and regulators around the world have been weighing new privacy and antitrust rules to limit the power of huge tech giants.

Google has consistently ranked among the top spenders when it comes to lobbying the government, alongside defense contractors and healthcare firms. The search giant said its discussions with lobbyists focused on search technology, criminal justice reform, and international tax reform.

If you wonder why some startups raise $50-100M rounds early on, consider this is what some of them are up against:

Filings showed that Facebook was lobbying the Federal Trade Commission, which is looking into its data security policies. After facing political scrutiny over “fake news” and the origin of ads on its platform during the 2016 presidential election in the US,

Facebook has been giving some of the world’s largest technology companies – more than 150 of them, far more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has ever disclosed according to an investigation by the New York Times. The Times interviewed over 60 people including current and former employees of Facebook and its partners, former government officials and privacy advocates – and reviewed over 270 pages of Facebook’s internal documents while performing technical tests and analysis to monitor what data Facebook has been handing out like candy.

The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. –NYT

The discovery goes far beyond the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal in which basic data was collected on up to 87 million users through a lifestyle survey app. Thanks to the United States having no general consumer privacy law, up to 400 million people’s private information was freely shared with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify and other partners – and they didn’t sell it; Facebook gave everyone’s information away for free throughout the tech community in order to foster industry relationships and advance their own interests.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight. –NYT

The company allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without their consent.

Netflix and Spotify were given the ability to read and delete Facebook users’ private messages.

Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages,

Another week, another set of reminders that, while Facebook likes to paint itself as an “optimistic” company that’s simply out to help users and connect the world, the reality is very different. This past week, those reminders include a collection of newly released documents suggesting that the company adopted a host of features and policies even though it knew those choices would harm users and undermine innovation.

This month, a member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament published a trove of internal documents from Facebook, obtained as part of a lawsuit by a firm called Six4Three. The emails, memos, and slides shed new light on Facebook’s private behavior before, during, and after the events leading to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Here are some key points from the roughly 250 pages of documents.

Facebook Uses New Android Update to Pry Into Your Private Life in Ever-More Terrifying Ways

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In newly revealed documents from 2015, however, Facebook employees discuss plans to coerce users into upgrading to a new, more privacy-invasive version of Messenger “without subjecting them to an Android permissions dialog at all,” despite knowing that this kind of misrepresentation of the app’s capabilities was “a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective.”

A top UK lawmaker said on Wednesday that Facebook maintained secretive “whitelisting agreements” with select companies that would give them preferential access to vast amounts of user data, after the parliamentary committee released documents which had been sealed by a California court, reports Bloomberg.

The documents – obtained in a sealed California lawsuit and leaked to the UK lawmaker during a London business trip, include internal emails involving CEO Mark Zuckerberg – and led committee chair Damian Collins to conclude that Facebook gave select companies preferential access to valuable user data for their apps, while shutting off access to data used by competing apps. Facebook also allegedly conducted global surveys of mobile app usage by customers – likely without their knowledge, and that “a change to Facebook’s Android app policy resulted in call and message data being recorded was deliberately made difficult for users to know about,” according to Bloomberg.

In one email, dated Feb. 4, 2015, a Facebook engineer said a feature of the Android Facebook app that would “continually upload” a user’s call and SMS history would be a “high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective.” A subsequent email suggests users wouldn’t need to be prompted to give permission for this feature to be activated. –Bloomberg

The emails also reveal that Zuckerberg personally approved limiting hobbling Twitter’s Vine video-sharing tool by preventing users from finding their friends on Facebook.

In one email, dated Jan. 23 2013, a Facebook engineer contacted Zuckerberg to say that rival Twitter Inc. had launched its Vine video-sharing tool, which users could connect to Facebook to find their friends there. The engineer suggested shutting down Vine’s access to the friends feature, to which Zuckerberg replied, “Yup, go for it.”

“We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents,” said Collins in a Twitter post accompanying the published emails. –Bloomberg

We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents.

This site offers factual information and viewpoints that might be useful in arriving at an understanding of the events of our time. We believe that the information comes from reliable sources, but cannot guarantee the information to be free of mistakes and incorrect interpretations. IPE has no official position on any issue and does not necessarily endorse the statements of any contributor.

In this week’s MacroVoices podcast, host Erik Townsend interviews Jonathan Tepper, author and co-founder of research shop Variant Perception. During the course of a meandering hour-long conversation, the two men discuss everything from VPs outlook on China’s economy and oil’s role as a recession indicator, to the problems inherent in the US’s version of capitalism.

After some well-deserved humblebragging about VP’s call to avoid cyclicals and stick with defensive shares, a call that finally panned out during the “Shocktober” market selloff, the two men turned to the subject of China and the possible long-term repercussions of the US-China trade war.

Asked for his view on Chinese markets, Tepper admitted that he had no insight into how the trade war might be resolved – or if it will be resolved. Instead, he seized the opportunity to pitch Variant Perception’s Chinese leading indicator index, which he said has consistently put his clients “in front of some of the most cyclical profitable trades out there” in emerging-markets.

Though Tepper offered one meaningful comment about the recent economic weakness in China: That China’s economy and currency are weakening because of structural domestic factors, not trade-related anxieties.

So our index gives us an insight into Chinese growth. And I can tell you that I’m sure the trade war is bad and I’m sure it’s going to have some impact. But the slowdown that we’ve seen in China this year predates trade war problems and certainly is not driven by them. It’s driven by domestic monetary conditions.

Some analysts speculate that the record drop in oil over the past few weeks could signal that a global recession is ahead. But Tepper argued that his indicators offer a slightly different take. Looking at oil’s moves over the past two years, WTI is still trading at more than double its post-2014 lows.

This pattern more closely resembles the run-up to the recession in 2001, when oil more than doubled following the Asian and Russian crises in the late 1990s. And while oil has reversed some of its advance in dollar terms, when the exchange rate is factored in, the price of oil is far higher in some fragile emerging market economies. With all of this in mind,

In April, the world learned that Cambridge Analytica, the Trump-allied data firm, gained access to data from 50 million Facebook users without their permission. It did so, as Kurt Wagner explains in Recode, through a targeted advertising program that sells advertisers “access to your News Feed, and uses that data to show you specific ads it thinks you’re likely to enjoy or click on.” Such data-sharing, The New York Times reports, wasn’t limited to advertisers and Cambridge Analytica, but extended to the makers of smartphones, which many people use to access Facebook.

The Times reports that lawmakers learned that “Facebook failed to closely monitor device makers after granting them access to the personal data of hundreds of millions of people, according to a previously unreported disclosure to Congress last month.” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., provided the Times with a letter from Facebook explaining the nature of the deals.

By 2013, Facebook developed partnerships with seven companies, including BlackBerry, to provide what it called “ ‘the Facebook experience’, custom-built software, typically, that gave those manufacturers’ customers access to Facebook on their phones.” The partnerships fell under a Federal Trade Commission consent decree that required a government-appointed monitor to provide oversight.

But, as the Times article notes, Facebook handpicked its own privacy monitor, in this case, a team from PwC (the brand name for PricewaterhouseCoopers). When the team conducted its first assessment in 2013, it examined Facebook’s partnerships with Microsoft and Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry. For both companies, “PricewaterhouseCoopers found only ‘limited evidence’ that Facebook had monitored or checked its partners’ compliance with its data use policies. That finding was redacted from a public version of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s report released by the F.T.C. in June.”

The letter from Facebook was written in response to Wyden’s questions during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in September. That hearing, the Times reports, “was held just weeks after The Times reported that Facebook had struck data-sharing deals with dozens of phone and tablet manufacturers, including Microsoft, BlackBerry and Amazon.”

As Wyden told the Times, “Facebook claimed that its data-sharing partnerships with smartphone manufacturers were on the up and up. … But Facebook’s own, handpicked auditors said the company wasn’t monitoring what smartphone manufacturers did with Americans’ personal information,

At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media…

This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.

Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”

In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.

“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which is funded by the U.S. government and NATO.

“They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”

Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.

This site offers factual information and viewpoints that might be useful in arriving at an understanding of the events of our time. We believe that the information comes from reliable sources, but cannot guarantee the information to be free of mistakes and incorrect interpretations. IPE has no official position on any issue and does not necessarily endorse the statements of any contributor.

Facebook is not private. They are partnered with a NATO backed think tank to censor their platform that is funded by the US government

“Facebook is a private company and can delete any pages they want,” has been repeated ad nauseam since Alex Jones was wiped from its platform. While it is certainly true that a private company can and should be able to choose who they associate with, the idea that Facebook is private is not accurate. For this reason, the recent purge of hundreds of alternative media sites, including the Free Thought Project, was not only questionable, but unconstitutional.

In May, after Americans were successfully whipped into a tizzy of Russian hacking and meddling, along with the fake news hysteria, the Americans begging for censorship craze came to a head when Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council.

Facebook announced that it partnered with the arm of the council, known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab that was brought on to help the social media behemoth with “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

Apparently, Free Thought Project was one of those threats.

Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council, so what, right? They can do whatever they want and hire outside third parties to help them police the platform they own, right? Yes, this is correct. However, the Atlantic Council is funded by government.

The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri.

The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the Airforce.

The “think tank” Facebook partnered with to make decisions on who they censor is directly funded by multiple state actors — including the United States — which voids any and all claims that Facebook is a wholly “private actor.”

What very few people know though, is that about 5 months ago, Facebook announced that is was officially partnering with the Atlantic Council in the form of an “election partnership […] to prevent [their] service from being abused during elections.” Indeed, the US midterm elections are only a couple of weeks away, so the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab are now going at it with full force, closing facebook accounts left and right that they personally deem could be fake accounts, or accounts spreading misinformation, based on very shady criterias.

One doesn’t need to look far to understand who the Atlantic Council are and what they stand for : it is a think tank essentially funded by NATO, weapons manufacturers, Middle-Eastern oil-state monarchies, billionaires and different branches of the US military. In short, it has been described as being nothing less than NATO’s unofficial propaganda wing. The Atlantic Council doesn’t shy away from its political intents across the world, which can be seen solely by looking at who sits on its directors board – the crème de la crème when it comes to US neocons & war criminals: Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. George P. Shultz, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, Colin Powell, Robert Gates, and many more.

Needless to say, the Atlantic Council has been on the same side as every single war and conflict engendered by US and NATO imperialism over the last 50 years, and has itself played a role in abusing democratic elections around the world as well as spreading propaganda and misinformation both in home countries and abroad to achieve its political means.

Libertarian and Conservative pages hit the hardest. Pages like the Anti-Media and The Free Thought Project with followers in the millions acquired over years unpublished at a stroke. Numerous others with hundreds of thousands, and tens of thousands as well. Twitter suspended many of them when they tweeted they had been Zucced

Just in time for midterms, Facebook has removed 559 pages and 251 accounts they claim have been spreading misinformation and spam. Several of the pages however – some with millions of followers, were pro-Trump conservatives who had spent years cultivating their followings.

Facebook has unpublished our page

After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo

Facebook claims that “domestic actors” have been creating “fake pages and accounts to attract people with shocking political news,” reports Bloomberg.

“The people behind the activity also post the same clickbait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites,” Facebook said in a Thursday blog post. “And they often use their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares. This artificially inflates engagement for their inauthentic pages and the posts they share, misleading people about their popularity and improving their ranking in news feed.”

Some pages Facebook removed had large followings of real and fake accounts. Nation in Distress, a conservative meme page, was followed by more than 3 million people, according to the Internet Archive, which stores historical versions of websites and other online content. –Bloomberg

That said, not all of the accounts with large followings were conservative; Reverb Press, for example, had over 700,000 followers and constantly attacked President Trump and Republicans,

While the Soviet Union has since been relegated to the dustbin of history, Herman and Chomsky’s text has proved indispensable, with multinationals like Google, Amazon and Facebook tightening their stranglehold on the news industry and the economy at large. As Chomsky warns, these corporations’ eagerness to appease their advertisers and manipulate their users’ behavior has “very serious distorting effects” on the stories we consume. “I don’t think that’s a healthy development, but it is happening,” he says. “And that means essentially dividing much of the population … into cocoons [or] bubbles, into which they receive the information conducive [only] to their own interests and commitments.”

Last week, Chomsky explored this topic and more in an exhaustive interview (“American Dissident”) with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill. What follows are just a few of the activist author’s more trenchant observations and digressions.

On the Republican White House

There’s an authentic constituency of corporate power and private wealth, and they’re being served magnificently by the executive orders [and] legislative programs that are being pushed through. [These] represent the more savage wing of the traditional Republican policies catering to private interests, private wealth, and dismissing the rest as irrelevant and easily disposed of.

At the same time, [Trump] is managing to maintain the voting constituency by pretending, very effectively, to be the one person in the world who stands up for them against the hated elites. And this is quite an impressive con job. How long he can carry it off? I don’t know.

On Trump’s handling of North Korea

He’s being lambasted for taking positions which, in my view, are pretty reasonable. So, for example, in the case of Korea: The two Koreas, last April 27th came out with a historic declaration, in which they laid out fairly explicit plans for moving towards reconciliation, integration, and denuclearization of the peninsula.

They pretty much pleaded with outsiders—that means the United States—to permit them to proceed,

By operating its own fleet of drones in the stratosphere, Facebook wants to bring wireless internet to remote parts of the world. The social media giant even hopes to expand beyond its current base of 2.2 billion monthly active users. It therefore came as as suprise when Facebook announced the suspension of its drone-building program Aquila in June. Contrary to some reports, the data company has not abandoned its ambitious plans for high-altitude connectivity. As a newly available document shows, Facebook and Airbus are jointly lobbying the European Commission in Brussels on the subject of drones.

Facebook said it would cooperate with Airbus on high altitude connectivity in late 2017, but did not give any details. Ever since, the two companies have lobbied for shared policy goals and could possibly enter an even closer business relationship soon. In April this year, Facebook and Airbus had a high-level meeting with a European Commission official, as the document released recently under FOI laws on request of lobby watchgroup Corporate Europe Observatory shows. According to the email, representatives of Facebook and Airbus met with Matthew Baldwin, Vice Director of the Directorate-General for Transport and Mobility.

A drone named Zephyr

The email mentions the Airbus Zephyr drone. „The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the state of play of the project and to see how it is covered by the global (EU) regulatory framework“, states the email, which was sent to several Commission officials. A spokesman for the European Commission, responding to our request, said that no such high-level meeting had taken place since then, but that there was „regular exchanges in order to keep track of technological developments“. (We did a new FOI request for more information.)

Flight tests in Western Australia

When approached by netzpolitik.org, Airbus and Facebook refused to comment on the specifics of the Brussels meeting and their common plans. And yet, their joint effort seems to indicate a possible deal over Zephyr drones by the two companies. A German Facebook spokesperson provided a hint in an email sent to us last week.

Add “a phone number I never gave Facebook for targeted advertising” to the list of deceptive and invasive ways Facebook makes money off your personal information. Contrary to user expectations and Facebook representatives’ own previous statements, the company has been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes—or that users never provided at all—for targeted advertising.

A group of academic researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton University, along with Gizmodo reporters, have used real-world tests to demonstrate how Facebook’s latest deceptive practice works. They found that Facebook harvests user phone numbers for targeted advertising in two disturbing ways: two-factor authentication (2FA) phone numbers, and “shadow” contact information.

Two-Factor Authentication Is Not The Problem

First, when a user gives Facebook their number for security purposes—to set up 2FA, or to receive alerts about new logins to their account—that phone number can become fair game for advertisers within weeks. (This is not the first time Facebook has misused 2FA phone numbers.)

But the important message for users is: this is not a reason to turn off or avoid 2FA. The problem is not with two-factor authentication. It’s not even a problem with the inherent weaknesses of SMS-based 2FA in particular. Instead, this is a problem with how Facebook has handled users’ information and violated their reasonable security and privacy expectations.

There are many types of 2FA. SMS-based 2FA requires a phone number, so you can receive a text with a “second factor” code when you log in. Other types of 2FA—like authenticator apps and hardware tokens—do not require a phone number to work. However, until just four months ago, Facebook required users to enter a phone number to turn on any type of 2FA, even though it offers its authenticator as a more secure alternative. Other companies—Google notable among them—also still follow that outdated practice.

Even with the welcome move to no longer require phone numbers for 2FA, Facebook still has work to do here.

Apparently Facebook thinks it’s the US military, or a NATO command center, or perhaps its millennial employees want to relive the 1980’s cult classic “WarGames” movie.

Facebook announced Wednesday that it plans to set up a “war room” at its Silicon Valley campus to prevent potential foreign election meddling during the midterms.

“We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the Brazil and US elections,” Facebook elections and civic engagement director Samidh Chakrabarti said, according to the AFP. He added, “It is going to serve as a command center so we can make real-time decisions as needed.”

A “command center” in a “war room” to make “real-time” decisions huh?… And oh Facebook says it will gain help from artificial intelligence software to prevent fake posts by those pesky Russians to boot…

Apparently office space for the planned anti-election meddling HQ has already been set aside as Facebook says it’s still in the procession of “building” this war room.

He declined to say when the “war room” — currently a conference room with a paper sign taped to the door — would be in operation.

Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message, according to executives.

Don’t worry America your elections are safe with Facebook on watch at the forward operating post! Though likely a conference room with paper taped to the door won’t exactly convey confidence and readiness to the American public.

“Preventing election interference on Facebook has been one of the biggest cross-team efforts the company has seen,” Chakrabarti continued.

The new initiative follows chief executive Mark Zuckerberg pledging that Facebook wouldn’t allow the type of “voter manipulation” that he says occurred ahead of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for which he admitted his company was “ill-prepared”.

“We’ve found and taken down foreign influence campaigns from Russia and Iran attempting to interfere in the US,

Such important reality as is shown in this picture is virtually unpublishable in mainstream US ‘news’media, because US ‘news’media need to deceive their public about the most important international realities — such as that the US imposed upon Ukraine a nazi regime against Russia, and the US now lies to accuse Russia for doing what Russia must do in order to protect itself from the US nazi regime next-door.

This picture is among many which were originally published in the excellent 4 July 2018 article by Asa Winstanley at The Electronic Intifada. His article was headlined “Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. That article focuses upon Israel’s strong support for the racist-fascist (or ideologically nazi) Government of Ukraine. (Click onto it to see the documentation — it’s Israeli nazis, against Russians, not against Jews, though they’re allied with ones that are against both, which is why the US did this — aiming to conquer ultimately Russia.)

How, then, can anybody believe the US ‘news’media, which hide these clear realities, instead of ever having reported them to the duped American public?

The US Government’s anti-Russian sanctions, and its NATO exercises with US missiles and tanks on and near Russia’s borders, are based upon the US government’s lies, not upon the truths that this photo represents and which will here be explained.